SuperPlane and Forklift through the evidence gate: measurements, license and open defects

Two projects showed up in newsletters lately: SuperPlane, which turns issues into pull requests through an agent, and Forklift, which migrates virtual machines from VMware, oVirt, OpenStack, Nutanix and Hyper-V to KubeVirt. We checked both against our OSS evidence gate. The gate asks for sources that are free to disagree with the project: issue tracker, license files, commit data, workflows. We have installed neither.

Open core means an open-source core sits under a recognised license while further features live in the same repository, or next to it, under a separate license that restricts use or redistribution. In SuperPlane the engine is Apache 2.0 and the ee/ directory carries an Enterprise license. What matters for operation is which files end up in the shipped binary.

Measurements of 9 November 2026

The measuring instrument is the GitHub REST API (api.github.com), branch main, measured on 9 November 2026. The 30-day window starts on 10 October 2026 by committer date.

Metric	Unit	SuperPlane	Forklift
Repository created	date	7 May 2025	8 Sep 2022
Last push	date (UTC)	8 Nov 2026	9 Nov 2026
Commits on main, 30 days	count	492	245
of which bot as author	count	207	181
of which agent trailer without bot author	count	139	17
Commits with neither marker	count	146	47
Contributors per API (incl. bots)	accounts	78	69
GitHub releases / tags	count	81 / at least 100	1 / 72
Open issues excluding pull requests	count	158	85
of which from accounts with no tie to the repo, bots excluded	issues (accounts)	19 (8)	40 (33)
Age of open issues (median)	days	24	744
Closed issues, of which "not planned"	count	2,655, of which 326	91, of which 5

The trailer count searches Signed-off-by and Co-authored-by for SuperPlane Agent, Cursor and Claude. It shows who is listed as a contributor and says nothing about the share of code written. In SuperPlane all 207 bot commits also carry the SuperPlane Agent trailer. Together that is 346 of 492 commits (70.3 %); the last 100 commits (29 Oct to 8 Nov) come to 74 %. In Forklift, 181 of the 198 marked commits are dependency and bundle updates from the Red Hat build bot red-hat-konflux[bot], which is build automation. Only 17 commits carry an agent trailer (Cursor, Claude).

Against the newsletter figures: SuperPlane has 9,301 stars instead of 8,800, 78 contributors instead of 83, and 81 releases as quoted. Forklift has 213 stars as quoted, 69 contributors instead of 71, and one release as quoted. Stars are an afterthought only: SuperPlane has 701 forks and 12 watchers, Forklift 122 forks and 6 watchers. We draw no recommendation from them.

On releases: Forklift has one GitHub release (v2.12.1 of 30 June 2026) but 72 tags up to v5.0.0 of 28 October 2026. SuperPlane's 81 releases include several components (CLI, fleet manager, runner); the latest main release is v1.0.0 of 27 October 2026, 13 days old.

SuperPlane: license and tracker

The LICENSE file opens with a sentence saying that files in /ee fall under the SuperPlane Enterprise Edition License, followed by the Apache text. The README mentions only Apache 2.0, and GitHub reports NOASSERTION. The ee/LICENSE allows use for self-hosting only with agreement to the terms of service and a valid Enterprise license; copying and modifying for development and testing is allowed without one.

The ee/README says the Enterprise code is always in the binary and features run only once the installation holds a license. According to the documentation SuperPlane verifies the license offline. Custom roles, groups and GitHub Enterprise hosts need a license. Billing code also sits under ee/ and always runs; usage costs are recorded even with billing switched off. Whether production use without an Enterprise license is permitted is not for us to decide here. The vendor would have to answer that in writing.

Of 158 open issues, 139 come from nine accounts with collaborator or contributor status, so they are the team's own backlog. 19 come from eight outsiders. 24 issues carry the label bug. Three read like findings against the core promise: #8641 (planning silently drops the plan and reports success), #8631 (agent runs commit workspace skills into the pull request) and #9186 (factory commits without DCO sign-off). Issue #8123, "Support GitLab workspaces", is open too. The pkg/integrations directory has github, gitlab and bitbucket but no Gitea, and our Git server is Gitea (git.senn-gruppe.com). The 2,655 closed issues say nothing about fixes, and 326 of them are "not planned".

The GitHub workflows are short: a Discord notification when issues open or close through a secret webhook, and a stale job. pull_request_target does not appear. CI and releases run on Semaphore (13 files, two of them read). Whether fork pull requests see secrets there is a project setting we cannot see from the repo. We did not read the productanalytics and telemetry directories in pkg/. What a self-hosted instance sends outward is open.

Forklift: tracker and workflows

Forklift is Apache 2.0 (LICENSE file read). The project is four years old, and its documentation page describes it as the upstream of Red Hat's Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV). 35 of the 245 commits in the last 30 days reference tickets in the format MTV-nnnn. Part of the defect list probably lives in a Red Hat ticket system that we have not looked at, so the 85 open GitHub issues show only a slice.

Of those, 12 were filed by a review bot, 53 have no comment and 63 are older than a year. Issue #7845 describes a plan with an OVA source and skipGuestConversion: true that ends as Succeeded although the target disk is empty. It has been open since 31 July 2026, has no comment and no label, comes from an outside account and is unconfirmed. It still gives a test rule: for a migration, the checksum of the target disk counts, not the status Succeeded.

Of the twelve workflows, one uses a pull_request_target trigger (create-new-pr.yml). It checks out no PR code and only posts a comment. Its condition reads github.event.comment, which that event does not carry, so the job probably never runs. More notable is myrotvorets/set-commit-status-action@master in run-osp-extended-tests.yml: a movable third-party reference that receives the GITHUB_TOKEN. The build path sits in .tekton and .konflux, which we did not read.

What this means for us

We run Proxmox. A search of docs\inventory on 9 November 2026 finds no hit for Kubernetes, KubeVirt, k3s or OpenShift, and the inventory lists no VMware environment either. How a move off VMware adds up is in Proxmox after VMware: the 2026 cost bill. More posts on virtualisation and operations are collected in the hub Servers, Proxmox and network. Anyone who wants their platform reviewed finds the offer under Services.

Forklift: do not adopt, because there is no use case. Re-evaluate if a KubeVirt decision comes up. The acceptance test would then be a checksum comparison of the target disk for each VM.

SuperPlane: watch. We would test it only if three conditions hold: Gitea support is proven in code, the question about ee/ in the binary is answered in writing, and the test runs on an isolated VM with outbound traffic captured.